Paradox of Self-Amendment by Peter Suber with an unjustified or arbitrary ultimate rule. The acceptance model, however, allows lesser rules to be validated by higher rules and allows an escape for the ultimate rule: it is not justified or validated by another rule within the system, but by the acceptance of the people. Such a move anchors the artificial system of rules in empirical, historical actuality, a side effect of the theory that Hart is very concerned to preserve. Logicians would be horrified to imagine that acceptance could provide anything like validity or authority to a rule, let alone validity or authority to itself. Acceptance provides no logical support, neither deductive nor inductive, and is as irrelevant to a rule's validity as personal opinion. But here is the crucial difference between legal and logical rules. Logical rules cannot be created, changed, or invalidated by counting votes or heeding the expressions of human will. Legal rules can be. The reason is not that legal rules use a different logic, or irrelevantly depend on belief rather than truth, but that legal rules are products of human history and not merely human thought. Whether a logical system should possess a theorem that says this rather than that is a question subject to rigorous methods, all abstract and determinate, even if inconclusive; but whether a legal rule should say this rather than that depends on an indefinite number of factors, some themselves indefinite, and always on acceptance. Can counting votes, however, make law unless there is a prior law that authorizes it to make law? Ronald Dworkin has argued that[Note 6] Some part of any constitutional theory...must stand on its own in political or moral theory; otherwise the theory would be wholly circular....It would be like the theory that majority will is the appropriate technique for social decision because that it what the majority wants. Dworkin would apparently be content if majority rule were justified by a political morality external to law. If this political morality is superior to other political moralities even in part because it is favored by the majority in that legal system, then circularity returns. But this circularity is different from a circularity within the legal system. A basic legal rule may justify itself (such as majority rule by a majority vote); because it is a legal rule, the circularity is within the system. If a basic rule is justified by something outside the system, such as acceptance or a political morality, and that alegal phenomenon is self-justifying, then the circularity is not within the system. The difference between these two kinds of circularity would be small and negligible if it were not for the political morality of the people and the limits on what they will accept. For a circularity within the system may justify anything, as tyrants establish tyranny or give themselves the power to give themselves power. We curb that kind of abuse, first of all, only if we dislike it, and second, only by making authority finally depend on a moral doctrine accepted by (or acceptable to) a significant fraction of the public. The accepted morality will be circularly justified outside the system, that is, it will be the final source of legal authority only because it is morally accepted by that same public. If we wish to avoid circular justifications of ultimate rules within the system, because of their liability to abuse, and if we wish to avoid an infinite regress of authorities and an unjustified authority, then we must locate the final source of legal authority outside the system. If that source is not to be self-justifying, then we are landed in the absurd position of requiring (for example) that the values that justify majority rule disregard the will of the majority or that the values that justify the appeal to acceptance of the people disregard the acceptance of the people. These reflections suggest that a self-justifying alegal source of legal authority is less absurd than the alternatives. Hart almost certainly did not foresee that the normative practice doctrine and the acceptance theory combine to give acceptance a circular authority, rather than a status beyond authority. But that outcome is not to be dismissed lightly. Hart does not elaborate his theory sufficiently for us to say whether he believed that acceptance authorizes law because its function as a source of authority is accepted, or whether it authorizes law regardless of the beliefs and widespread dissent of the people and officials. Conceivably, acceptance could authorize law in a society in which the people and officials believed that only a deity could authorize law. This is only apparently denied by the proposition that acceptance is self-justifying. If the people do not accept the proposition that law is authorized by acceptance, and instead accept the view that law is authorized by the deity or the army, then these alternative theories are supported by acceptance and nothing more. Acceptance is not supported by acceptance, but nothing can authorize law unless it is accepted as authorizing law. Whether acceptance is omnipotent and can use its power to limit, change, or end its power is further discussed in Sections 8 and 21; I will argue that it has continuing omnipotence and is the true basis of the people's inalienable sovereignty. The merit of a self-justifying alegal ultimate source of legal authority may be made clearer by another example. Paul Brest notes that the supremacy clause of the federal constitution (Article VI, §2) declares the whole constitution of which it is a part to be supreme. He adds that "a document cannot achieve the status of law, let alone supreme law, merely by its own assertion."[Note 7] Brest is right. The supremacy clause is made true either by a prior rule to regard the words of the constitution as authoritative (which virtually makes the supremacy clause surplusage), or by direct acceptance of the terms of the clause. This is more conspicuous with Article VII, the ratification clause, which declared the constitution "established" upon the affirmative votes of any 9 of the original 13 states. Upon the ninth affirmative vote (New Hampshire) the constitution became established by its own test.[Note 8] The words of Article VII did not authorize that establishment, but they tell us that establishment is authorized by the will of the ratifiers. The constitution was established because it was accepted; more particularly, it was established when and because the condition it laid down for establishment was accepted by the ratifiers. These examples show the acceptance theory in a context where its contractarian elements come to the fore. A legal system which people and officials encounter in media res is accepted or not without contract principles entering the picture in any strong form.[Note 9] But the initial 38